Quebec Student Strike: Dissecting the movement, the reaction and the direction

In February, some of Quebec’s post-secondary students went on strike, stopped attending classes and took to the streets to protest a proposed 75% hike in tuition fees. Three months later, the students are still protesting — sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. Small red squares of cloth, pinned to lapels and backpack straps, have become the symbol of protest.

The demonstrations have now caught international attention. The students’ refusal to back down, the provincial government’s position and the general social unrest was this week labelled Canada’s “Maple Spring” by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The National Post‘s Allison Cross explains what’s going on in the longest student strike in Quebec’s history.

Q: Why is everyone marching in the streets in Montreal?

The Quebec Liberal government wanted to increase tuition fees at post-secondary schools by $1,625 over five years. The hike worked out to $325 per year, although the government has since offered to modify the increase to $1,775 over seven years. In an attempt to assuage demonstrators, the government explained the hike works out to 50 cents per day after factoring in the tuition fee tax credit.

Striking students continue to staunchly oppose the hike. CLASSE (Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarite syndicale etudiante), a group that represents about half the students on strike, is ultimately pushing for free, universal access to post-secondary education.

Other groups want to freeze tuition fees at what they are now: an average of $2,168 per year.

On Thursday, CLASSE presented their latest demands, which include:

A cut to the percentage of university funding that goes toward research; it currently sits at 26.2%.

Cutting the practice of universities advertising to attract students, saving $18-million a year.

An immediate freeze on the wages and hiring of university administrators, both of which CLASSE says have exploded in recent years.

A moratorium on the construction of satellite campuses far from university home sites, which CLASSE says only results in schools stealing students from each other.

Q: Don’t students in Quebec pay the lowest tuition fees in Canada?

Quebec students currently pay about half of what other Canadian students pay on average. Premier Jean Charest argues that the tuition hike would bring in much needed cash for Quebec’s post-secondary education system.

Striking student groups in turn argue tuition fees in other provinces are already too high, and Quebec’s increase would erect another barrier to education. The protests have also been called a backlash against the “greedy elite,” and an expression of anger over the country’s failing democracy.

Even if the tuition hike goes through, Quebec students will still have cheaper fees than any other province in Canada. For the 2011/2012 school year, Canadian undergraduates paid an average of $5,366 in tuition, according to Statistics Canada.

Students in Quebec started protesting against the hike in January before officially going on strike in February. According to police, Montreal has been the site of 170 demonstrations by university and CEGEP (pre-university and vocational college) students. Many have been peaceful, but many have included acts of vandalism and ended with mass arrests.

On April 20, students demonstrated outside a job fair for Quebec’s Plan Nord — a major initiative to develop the province’s north — where Mr. Charest was speaking. One demonstrator was pepper sprayed in the face as he tried to enter the Palais des Congres. In his speech that day, Mr. Charest mocked the protesters and offered to give them jobs in the province’s north.

A downtown clash with police on April 25 led to 85 arrests and three injured police officers. An anti-capitalism protest on May 1, although not officially affiliated with the student strike, led to 103 arrests for illegal assembly and criminal acts. Protesters covered their faces in black and red scarves and used Black Bloc anarchist tactics, which included smashing windows and destroying property.

Riot police have used stun guns, pepper spray and batons to disperse the crowds, which have flooded the streets, blocked bridges and vandalized businesses.

Since January, roughly 450 people have been arrested in Montreal, according to media reports and police numbers.

Q: Are all Quebec students supporting the strike?

No. Two-thirds of Quebec students are still in school or have finished writing their final exams before the summer break. With only three of their departments affected, classes at McGill University have continued largely uninterrupted.

The students who are striking — roughly 185,000 — are split into several groups: CLASSE represents about half of the striking students and is the most radical. FEUQ (Federation of Quebec University Students) and FECQ (Federation of Quebec College Students), which represent the remainder of the students, are more moderate.

The striking students don’t have a monolithic voice. An example of the fracture between the different groups came when masked demonstrators crashed a press conference held by one student group on Wednesday, and heckled the student leaders who were speaking.

Students who are eager to return to class but can’t because of the strike have taken their issue to court. Even when they successful obtain injunctions to go to school, some striking students have physically blocked them from entering their classrooms.

Q: What does the strike mean for the school term?

Many schools warned students that if they did not return to class by April 30, they would risk losing the term and their ability to graduate. That date came and went and one-third of the province’s students are still on strike. A handful of schools have suggested it may be possible to modify their calendars to accommodate the striking students.

Q: Are the protests illegal?

Peaceful protest is legal where demonstrators obey the law, police say, but vandalizing property and assaulting police officers is not. Montreal police released a set of guidelines for a peaceful protest, and an explanation of how to know when a demonstration has been declared illegal.

“It remains unacceptable that acts of violence and criminal acts are committed. A demonstration is then declared illegal and all persons have to immediately leave the premises,” police said in a statement.

If police officers clad in riot gear show up, demonstrators must to leave or risk being arrested.

“Police officers will give one or several verbal warnings using a megaphone asking all persons on the premises to leave the area. However, it is possible that you do not hear them,” police said. “For that reason, we ask that you pay close attention to your surroundings in order to be able to recognize that the demonstration has been declared illegal.

How much time police give demonstrators to leave after a gathering has been declared illegal depends on each individual situation.

Q: How has the government responded to the strikes?

Quebec Premier Jean Charest initially took a hard line against the strikers, ignored their demands and refused to negotiate. But last week as a compromise he offered to spread the tuition increase over seven years instead of five, boost bursaries and make the repayment of loans proportional to income.

Quebec’s Education Minister Line Beauchamp said Tuesday the government would not agree to mediation with the striking students unless they abandoned their demands to keep tuition frozen at the current rate of $2,168.

Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois and Liberal Finance Minister Raymond Bachand piped in Wednesday to suggest an election was the only way to resolve the strike, now in its fourth month. Ms. Marois said she’d like to see an election now, whereas Mr. Bachand said it should happen within a year.

The PQ has said it would cancel the tuition hike and instead call on a summit on education if elected.

At a federal level, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been tight-lipped on the strike.

Q: The Guardian Newspaper this week called this Canada’s Maple Spring; what has been the international reaction to the protests?

French media has taken an interest in the strike, with Agence France-Presse, La Monde and TV5 picking up the story. So have Al-Jazeera and CNN.

The Economist ran a story about the Quebec protests, linking the strike to Quebecers who “have long seen cheap university education as a birthright.”

In the Guardian story, Canadian writer and activist Martin Lukacs characterized the Liberal government’s response as “a war on the students’ right to collectively negotiate the conditions of their studies. It has mocked and vilified students in the corporate media; sought legal injunctions to dismantle picket lines and force teachers to class; and unleashed vicious police crackdowns and mass arrests against peaceful protesters as young as 15 and 16.”

Mr. Lukacs writes that students won’t back down from their strike, because they have the “chance to turn the tide of a generation.”

Q: Has Canada seen anything like this before?

In 1996, roughly 60,000 Quebec students went on strike for a month to protest Lucien Bouchard’s government’s attempt to unfreeze tuition. The government eventually announced a 30% hike but it was followed by a freeze.

Roughly 170,000 Quebec students went on strike from February to April in 2005 to oppose the Charest government, which wanted to cut $103-million from the province’s grants and loans program. The students came to an agreement with the government, which saw $70-million put into financial aid for 2005/2006, and the $103-million returned for four years after that.